Last week, at a New Orleans conference center that once doubled as a storm shelter for thousands during Hurricane Katrina, a group of polar scientists made a startling declaration: The Arctic as we once knew it is no more.

The region is now definitively trending toward an ice-free state, the scientists said, with wide-ranging ramifications for ecosystems, national security, and the stability of the global climate system. It was a fitting venue for an eye-opening reminder that, on its current path, civilization is engaged in an existential gamble with the planet’s life-support system.

In an accompanying annual report on the Arctic’s health—titled “Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades”—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees all official U.S. research in the region, coined a term: “New Arctic.”

For such Progressive people, they sure are afraid of change, and seem to want things to stay like the past. They sure harass women like it’s the past, but, that’s a different story.

Until roughly a decade or so ago, the region was holding up relatively well, despite warming at roughly twice the rate of the planet as a whole. But in recent years, it’s undergone an abrupt change, which now defines it. The Arctic is our glimpse of an Earth in flux, transforming into something that’s radically different from today.

Like has constantly happened throughout the 4.5 billion years Earth has been around. Heck, 20,000 years ago the ice age ended.

How disingenuous. Most of that time the Earth was in the midst of the Little Ice Age.

That the Arctic is now a relic of a time gone by—the first major part of the planet on a countdown clock—should shock us. It’s one of those facts that those of us who closely follow climate change knew was coming. And with its arrival, it is devastating in its totality.

The loss of the Old Arctic is as close as humanity has come so far to irreversibly transforming its planet into something fundamentally different than what has given rise to civilization over the past 10,000 years. This is a terrifying transition, and one worth mourning. But it’s also a reminder that our path as individuals and as a society is not fixed.

If the Arctic can change this quickly, then so must we.

Great, sounds great. Let’s start with all the Warmists, who need to give up their own use of fossil fuels and go carbon neutral. And pay lots of taxes and fees. And curtail their freedom. And start living like it’s the 1400’s.